Filling Sahara with solar and wind farms would double local rainfall

Covering the entire Sahara desert in solar panels and wind farms would not only help power the world, it would also improve the local climate. Rainfall would more than double and there would also be a modest increase in vegetation cover.

“There would be a slight greening of the Sahara,” says Fred Kucharski of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy. This would not be nearly enough to return the Sahara to the much greener state it was in as recently as 6000 years ago, but at least the overall …